Ecstasy Page 4

  Since I was desperate, I gritted my teeth and opted for the latter. I even called Melissa—who in addition to being my housemate is a Monitor staff photographer—to come take a picture, for which they smiled nicely and hid their cigarettes under a blanket.

  The story ran in the next day’s paper—where the aforementioned wholesome youth wound up as the page-one feature package. I ran into some of them Thursday afternoon as I was wandering the vendor booths for yet another sidebar—interviewing purveyors of open-backed halter tops, beeswax candles, handmade drums, and the like. When I ventured over to a stand selling fabric hats, the four girls trying on the floppy fashions turned out to be Lauren, Cindy, Trish, and Dorrie. They each had on a version of a jester’s cap, complete with garish colors and jingle bells, and they were jostling for a peek in the lone hand mirror.

  Trish noticed me first. “Hey,” she said, “it’s you.”

  The other three turned around, heads all ajingle.

  “Hey,” Lauren said, “how ya doin’?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Really?” Dorrie offered. “You don’t look so good.”

  “I’m just tired. I only got five hours of sleep last night.”

  Dorrie pulled off the (extremely hideous) cap, which would’ve been an improvement if she hadn’t had the coiffure of a West Point plebe. “You got five hours?” she said. “That’s, like, twice as much as we got.”

  “Melting Rock’s not about sleep,” Lauren said. She snagged another look in the mirror before handing it back to Cindy, whose violet hair clashed mightily with her magenta hat. “Never was, never will be.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “Between all the drumming and the drunks screaming all night—”

  “Hey,” Dorrie said, “didn’t you say you were supposed to write about the real Melting Rock? Well, you got it, huh?”

  “Great.”

  The four of them were in the midst of debating precisely how little sleep they’d gotten when they were favored with a lengthy wolf whistle.

  “Yo, ladies,” said the whistler, a long-legged guy of maybe twenty with a giant scab on his left knee. “Lookin’ good.”

  He was standing there with his arms crossed, clearly attempting to look as cool as is humanly possible; hovering next to him was a com-padre of about the same age, a stockier fellow with a shaved head and four—no, five—earrings shinning up the curve of his left ear.

  “Hey, Axel,” Dorrie said with a wave, and the others followed suit. “How’s it goin’?”

  “Mighty fine,” he said, wandering down the aisle toward a table selling a variety of pipes that would never know tobacco. “Mighty damn fine.”

  His friend followed, looking the girls up and down like he was trying to decide whether to have them roasted or grilled. When he was done, he winked at them, so exaggeratedly it almost looked like there was something wrong with his eye; none of them seemed to notice. The lack of response seemed to piss him off, and he turned his attention to the wares at the House o’ Highs.

  “Is it my imagination,” Axel said as he wandered off, “or do you ladies get more sexalicious every year?”

  The girls swapped a set of gooney, wide-eyed looks and, being a member of the female persuasion, my crush radar went off for the second time in two days. It took me another half second to figure out which one had a thing for Mister Giant Knee Scab, because Lauren turned to Dorrie and mouthed Go talk to him. Dorrie shook her head and mouthed No way, but Lauren gave her a shove in his direction; Dorrie resisted, but barely. Then she giggled—the sound was a weird contrast with the crew cut—and jogged after him. “Hey, Axel,” she yelled, “wait up….”

  Lauren turned back to the mirror and doffed the jester’s cap, trading it for a cloche made of a half-dozen different fabrics that made me think the seamstress needed residential treatment. “You know,” she said, “that story you did on us was pretty cool.”

  “Glad you liked it.”

  “It was way cool,” Cindy said. “My mom wants to buy, like, ten extra copies. You think she can do that?”

  “Yeah, she can just call the circulation department.”

  Lauren stopped futzing with the hat and turned to her. “When’d you talk to your mom?”

  Cindy became the dictionary definition of mortified. “Uh…a while ago.”

  Lauren rolled her big brown eyes. “She still making you call in? I thought you were gonna tell her to get over herself.”

  “I tried, but it was totally no go. I mean, you know, she’s always gonna think of me like the baby in the family. It was, like, ‘Take the cell phone and call before noon every day or you’re not going, period.’ ”

  Lauren’s eyes bugged out even farther. “Cell phone?”

  “Er…She didn’t want me saying the lines at the pay phones were too long.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Hey,” Trish said, “at least you’ve only gotta call once a day, okay?”

  The other three offered up suitably pitying looks. It fell to Lauren to translate.

  “Trish’s dad is, like, really strict,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “he let you come here, didn’t he?” I’m not sure why I suddenly found myself sympathizing with the parental side of things; maybe it’s because I’d let a kid of mine go to Melting Rock over my dead body.

  “Wouldn’t look too good if he didn’t,” Cindy said.

  “Yeah,” Lauren said, “that’d be like saying it wasn’t safe, right?” After they nodded amongst themselves for a while, she noticed I had no idea what they were talking about. “Trish’s dad is a cop.”

  “In Gabriel?” I cast about for which of Cody’s colleagues might qualify and came up empty.

  Trish shook her head. Then she took off her jester’s cap, like all the jingling was suddenly giving her a headache. “I wish. He’s the Jaspersburg chief of police.”

  “Oh.”

  “ ‘Oh,’ ” Trish mimicked back at me. “That’s what everybody says. ‘Oh, your dad’s a cop. Oh.’ ”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  Trish looked at me like I was a bona fide fool. “It totally changes the way people think about you, that’s what. ‘Don’t do anything bad around Trish, she might tell her dad… .’ ”

  Cindy put an arm around her. “Hey,” she said, “your dad’s not so awful.”

  Trish hung the hat on a wooden peg. “As Nazi storm troopers go.”

  “Well,” I said, “for what it’s worth, from what I saw yesterday, nobody felt too inhibited around you.”

  “They’re my friends.”

  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t. “Does your dad hang out around here during the festival?”

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  “Don’t the local cops have some kind of presence, you know, just for safety’s sake?”

  Lauren plucked a paisley skullcap from a peg and plopped it on my head. “You’ve never been here before, have you?”

  “Once, a long time ago. Just for a couple of hours.”

  “Figures. Listen, like we said yesterday, Melting Rock is its own thing. As long as nobody gets hurt, everybody kind of looks the other way.”

  “And why is that?”

  Lauren shrugged. “I dunno. Tradition, I guess.”

  After twenty-four hours of quasiflackery, my journalistic instincts finally kicked in. “Do you think it’s maybe about the bottom line? I mean, how many people are gonna show if there’re cops all over the place?”

  Trish looked at me like maybe I wasn’t such a moron, after all. “Not a whole lot,” she said. “I sure as hell wouldn’t.”

  I LEFT THE three of them closing their deals with the mad hatter and went in search of lunch. I was closing a deal of my own (with the makers of a black-bean burrito with extra guacamole) when I ran into the last person I expected to see at Melting Rock—a guy who did me the favor of making me the second most miserable person there.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” I said, as it wa
s the first thing that came to mind. “And why in God’s name are you wearing a tie?”

  “I’m working,” he said.

  “Well, I didn’t think you were here for the food.”

  “That’s for damn sure.”

  “Want a bite of my burrito?”

  “Yeah.”

  The unhappy bastard in question was one Gordon Band, the up-state correspondent for the New York Times and my former colleague at the Monitor. Gordon is officially the most ambitious person I’ve ever met, and though he works for the journalistic equivalent of the Yankees, he’s not what you’d call happy on a day-to-day basis. Or, come to think of it, ever.

  “So what are you doing here?” I asked, once he’d demolished half my lunch. “Wait, let me guess. Your editor made you do it.”

  “I hate my editor.”

  “You say that a lot.”

  “And I mean it every time.”

  “You here for the whole weekend?”

  He reclaimed the burrito, took another bite, and talked with his mouth full. “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I ask myself that every day.”

  He made a deeply unattractive snorting sound. “Anyway, I’d fucking kill him if he tried to make me spend another day at this freak show. I’d rather have my guts dug out with a—”

  “I’m here the whole weekend.” He stared at me for a minute, then launched into a laughing fit. It continued for some time. “Jesus, Gordon, would you be nice?”

  “Do you have to sleep here and everything?” I didn’t answer. “Tell me you don’t have to sleep here….”

  I cleared my throat. “On the advice of counsel, I choose not to answer.”

  More insane chuckling. “Are you living in a tent? Oh, my God, that is priceless.…”

  “Hey, at least I’m not sleeping in my car.”

  He gave me a sour look. “It’s a van.”

  “Whatever.”

  “A tent. Alex Bernier in a goddamn tent. Christ, I wish I had a camera with me.…”

  “You know, some people think camping out is fun.”

  “What are you now, the goddamn queen of the forest?”

  He finally caught his breath and reached for a napkin to wipe his little round glasses—but since it had previously contained my burrito, he only managed to smear grease all over the lenses. He swore under his breath, yanked the hem of his undershirt out of his pants, and tried to clean up the mess.

  “Serves you right,” I said.

  “I’m still hungry.”

  I waited while he scored a hot dog, and the two of us took refuge under a scraggly tree. He handed me a diet Coke, then ruined the gesture by saying he’d bought it out of pity.

  “So,” I said, “how’ve you been, anyway?”

  His face immediately twisted into the scowl that constituted one of his four major expressions.

  “Have I mentioned I hate my editor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I do.”

  “Are you any closer to getting yourself back to the Big Apple?” No response. “Come on, Gordon. It’s not so bad up here. Some of us even consider it home.”

  “Ugh.”

  “So what’ve you been covering out here?” I gestured toward the grooving masses. “You just doing a general-feature thing?”

  He nodded. “Running in Metro with some big stupid picture. Monday, I think. How’d you get shafted with this shitbag assignment, anyhow?”

  I told him. He laughed, again in a not-very-nice way.

  “Madison’s a smart son of a bitch.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell him you said so.”

  We parted ways fifteen minutes later, with Gordon still making nasty remarks about my sleeping accommodations. Having no choice in the matter, I made a visit to the third circle of hell, aka “the Porta-Johns.” Then I spent the next hour trying (and failing) to track down the guy with all the Melting Rock tattoos.

  The festival was definitely in full swing then, with revelers filling every square inch of trampled grass. As I passed the main stage, I noticed that what appeared to be a genuine mosh pit had formed in front of it. Live human beings were getting passed over people’s heads like sacks of flour, and they actually seemed not to mind. People were dancing so close they might as well have been wearing each other’s undershorts. From the fact that the crowd was screaming “STUMPY! STUUUUMPEEEE!” I deduced that the band was Stumpy the Salamander.

  There were five of them—lead singer, drummer, two guitarists, and a keyboard player. And although the singer was front and center, it was fairly obvious that the drummer was running the show. The other band members seemed to be taking their cues from him, checking back over their shoulders every once in a while. The guy was wearing a cutoff shirt, whacking on the drum set in a blur of spidery white arms. The lower half of his face was covered in a scraggly black beard; poofed atop his bullet-shaped noggin was a multicolored Rastafarian cap.

  He looked, in a word, ridiculous.

  The song they were playing seemed to have something to do with a dog who liked to chew up shoes, cast as some sort of romantic allegory. I managed to catch a snippet of the lyrics:

  She’s got my heart inside her jaws.

  She holds the world between her paws.

  I tell her no, but she just won’t quit.

  O doggie, don’t you love me just a bit?

  It must’ve been a favorite, because the crowd was going wild, stomping and hooting and whirling each other around. There was no denying that there was a lot of energy pulsating through the fairgrounds, the beat binding the people and the band together in some funky symbiosis. For a second I thought I could understand what people loved about Melting Rock—the sheer, mindless camaraderie of it. Then somebody stepped on my foot, hard, and I decided they could all go to hell.

  Reverting to my former state of journalistic desperation, I wandered around for a while looking for something to write about. Just when I was ready to conduct another interview with the funnel-cake salesman, I happened upon the Melting Rock equivalent of a blood sport: a cadre of young men engaged in a Hacky Sack tournament. Hallelujah.

  I filed the story two hours later, along with a little profile of the winner. As it turned out, this beanbag he-man was Axel Robinette—the older, scab-kneed fellow whom Dorrie Benson had been mooning over a few hours before. And there she was: stapled to his flank and basking in his reflected glow.

  I hit the sack early, determined to make up for the previous night’s sleep deprivation. No go; if anything, the Thursday-evening festivities were even more bacchanalian. I tried plugging my ears with cotton balls, a vain stratagem if ever there was one. The drumbeat was deafening, as were the screeches and howls of several hundred drunks. I lay sweltering in my tent, cursing everyone who’d been remotely involved in dragging me there. I read my New Yorker until my flashlight died; then I spent some quality time wallowing in a swamp of similes, comparing Melting Rock to everything from a Stasi torture chamber to a special-ed class reunion.

  I finally fell asleep around four, only to get up before seven. That would’ve been bad enough, but what woke me was way worse.

  It was the sound of a girl screaming.

  Screaming, as they say, to wake the dead.

  CHAPTER4

  I’m not sure how I knew something was really wrong—that this was something other than the usual drug-addled hijinks. I mean, it wasn’t as though people hadn’t been hollering all night long, a few even shouting “Help” at the top of their lungs. But there was always some mitigating factor in their voices, a layer of laughter or irony or plain-old inebriation that told you that everything was okay.

  This time, the cry that streaked across the field of tents was 100 percent pure; it contained horror and nothing but. It started off with a shriek, piercing and awful and long enough to wake me up in time to hear the rest. “Help me,” it said. “Oh, God, please, somebody help me….”

  The campground was silent for a few beats before voices erupte
d all around; people were trying to figure out whether the screams were for real, and if they were, where they were coming from. I was about to scramble out of my tent when I realized that I was wearing nothing but a tank top and a pair of pink cotton panties that said TUESDAY. Half-zombified, I rooted around in the half-light for some shorts and a sweat jacket; once I found my clothes I did another Braille search for my glasses.

  By the time I found them and got out of the tent, there were dozens of other people standing around trying to figure out what they were supposed to do. A couple of seconds later, there was another shout from the same direction, this time a man’s voice. It was a lot calmer, though still fairly freaked out. “Somebody get the EMTs,” he said. “Does anybody have a cell phone? Somebody needs to call an ambulance. Come on, somebody’s gotta have a cell phone….”

  I did, but before I could yell back, someone else beat me to it. So I followed the scraggly crowd toward the epicenter of the distress, which turned out to be a battered blue tent festooned with blinking red lights shaped like chili peppers. There were a couple of folding chairs by the open flap, and lying on the ground in front of them was the body of a young man.

  I say body because even from a distance—even peeking through the gaps in the crowd—I could tell he was dead. His eyes were glassy and staring, like the vacant expression you see on a deer lashed to a car hood during hunting season.

  The girl was still screaming, grabbing the front of his T-shirt and yanking it toward her as though the motion could wake him. But all it did was roll him from side to side—not much, but enough so his head rocked back and forth in some awful parody of being alive.

  In a weird way, neither one of them looked human. She was shrieking like an animal; he was lying there like some sort of horror-movie prop.

  Maybe that’s why it took me so long to recognize them. But after a couple of minutes—once an older woman had wrapped her arms around the girl and gotten her to calm down a little—I noticed that she had purple hair. Even at Melting Rock, it was pretty damn distinctive.

  The girl was Cindy Bauer.

  That made me take a closer look at the corpse. It had a wispy goatee, but no glasses—another reason why the face hadn’t seemed familiar.